There's an old Chinese curse that goes like this: "May you live in interesting times." And 2013—the year of the snake on the Chinese zodiac calendar—certainly qualified. Here's a look at the year's top China stories:

Xi Jinping Takes Control

In March, Xi Jinping officially became the president of the People's Republic of China, completing a process that began the previous fall when he assumed chairmanship of the Communist Party and control of China's Central Military Commission. The son of a Xi Zhongxun, a high-ranking official during the Mao era, Xi (along with his glamorous wife) represented a break from the dour, workmanlike administration of his predecessor, Hu Jintao.

Upon taking power Xi adopted "China Dream" as the country's slogan, reaffirming the sense that national greatness, more than anything else, is China's central ideology. Politically, Xi's went to work tackling corruption, perhaps the issue that poses the greatest existential threat to the Communist's grip on power. Over the three decades of economic growth, China's leadership—both on the local and national level—enriched themselves through nebulous patronage networks, and adopted some of the trappings of privilege: flashy cars and foreign education. Xi issued a directive prohibiting officials from indulgences like banquet lunches and private cars, encouraging Party members to stick to "four dishes and a soup" and consider carpools. However, Xi has yet to show any ability to tackle the root causes of corruption: the entwining of business and politics.

Xi proved more successful in consolidating his power, though. At the Third Plenary sessions in November, the Party announced the formation of two new governing task forces (on national security and economics) that will help streamline decision-making at the highest level of Chinese politics. These moves signaled that Xi is already more powerful than his predecessor had ever become—and is likely to grow more powerful still.

Economic and Social Reforms Deepen

The Third Plenum wasn't just about politics—the meeting introduced important policy changes, too. Beijing announced reforms to the hukou, a household registration system that functions as an internal passport and prevents migrant workers from obtaining benefits like education and health care in Chinese cities. Now, workers with a rural hukou will be relaxed in second and third-tier cities, a reform that will better empower China's millions of newly urbanized citizens.

The plenary session also brought forth reforms to the economy, requiring state-owned companies—which still dominate China's economy—to contribute a higher percentage of their profits to fund social welfare programs. State-owned firms must also now allow private investors to gain up to a 15 percent equity stake.

But most notably, the Third Plenum announced the loosening of China's one-child policy, which, since its imposition in 1979, had transformed the country's demographics and society—mostly for the worse. Now, families in which one or both parents are only children can apply for permission to have a second child. While the reform comes too late to reverse China's shrinking labor force—Chinese people are having fewer children nowadays, anyway—it does relax a system whose social consequences, including forced sterilization and abortion, represent one of China's worst human rights violations.

The Economy Slows—but Does it Matter?

China's GDP grew by just under eight percent in the first three quarters of 2013, and, triggering the usual handwringing about the economy: Is the Chinese miracle coming to an end?

Without question, China's economy has serious problems—the "shadow banking" sector, municipal debt, and a housing bubble all, if left unresolved, have the potential to cause a sharp downturn. In addition, Beijing has been slow to move the economy away from a growth model that, because of a reliance on exports and investment, is fundamentally unsustainable.

But GDP—a notoriously unreliable statistic in China—is the least of the government's worries. Worsening income inequality has blossomed into a major social problem, and real class divisions—once unthinkable in Communist China—have re-emerged.

The Worsening Environmental Crisis

In a recent appearance on the China-focused Sinica Podcast, The Atlantic's James Fallows remarked that the iconic image of contemporary China, rather than a factory, was now the polluted skies plaguing Beijing and other major cities. But while air pollution remains a persistent problem—a crisis in Beijing in January was particularly bad—it is hardly China's only environmental crisis. In March, thousands of pigs turned up dead in Shanghai's Huangpu River, raising questions about the safety of the country's water supply. Food security, too, is an issue: stories of rat meat masquerading as lamb appeared in the Chinese media this year, and a scandal involving recycled cooking oil caused widespread fear—and revulsion—when revealed in October.

The Chinese government made progress in tightening environmental regulations during the year, and the country has invested greatly in alternative sources of energy. Nevertheless, as the year winds to a close (with horrific skies now enveloping Shanghai), no other issue has the potential to unite China's divided population more than the environmental crisis.

Spying, Summits, and the Sino-American Relationship

Sino-American relations got off to a rocky start in February 2013 with the revelation that China's People Liberation Army Unit 61398 systematically hacked into American government and corporate interests from a non-descript apartment complex outside Shanghai. Though this discovery, uncovered by the security firm Mandiant, didn't really surprise anyone, it nonetheless revealed the depth and sophistication of China's cyber capabilities.

In order to repair the rocky relationship, Presidents Xi and Obama convened at the Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage, California, in April for a "shirtsleeves summit": an opportunity for the men to converse without the stifling formality of a state visit. The conversation seemed to go well—Obama for his part called it "terrific"—but any comity between the two countries evaporated in June when Edward Snowden surfaced in Hong Kong with a trove of U.S. government secrets, including information on American spying on China.

Snowden didn't linger in Hong Kong, ultimately—to Beijing's relief—moving to an uncertain future in Russia. But his brief sojourn in a Chinese territory undid any of the warm feelings lingering from the California summit, and undermined Washington's moral ground in the question of governing spying.

Exit Bo Xilai

The trial of Bo Xilai, the former Chongqing Party Secretary whose 2012 downfall became China's most serious political scandal in decades, finally took place in August and, as expected, resulted in a guilty verdict.

But even still, the trial of the high-profile leader was still extraordinary by Chinese standards. State-media coverage of the event was more transparent than with any other trial in decades, and Bo, in contrast to the usual contrition of Chinese defendants, was defiant to the end.

Was Bo's trial an advancement for the rule of law in China? Or just the same old abrogation of justice? Either way, it brought to an end one of the most remarkable careers in Chinese politics.

Tension in the East China Sea

In 2013, China's forceful pursuit of territorial claims in the East China Sea encountered stiffer resistance from its neighbors. In January, The Philippines made a formal appeal to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to declare China's claims in what Manila calls the "West Philippine Sea" illegal.

But the more serious dispute occurred with China's most important rival: Japan. In late November, tension between the two countries over the energy-rich Senkaku/Diaoyu islands escalated when China announced an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) requiring aircraft flying near the islands to notify China first. The announcement drew immediate opposition from Tokyo, Seoul, and Washington, and raised the possibility that an accident might provoke a dangerous overreaction. In Asia this week, Vice President Biden announced that American planes will not obey China's ADIZ, mirroring the Japanese position, and barring an unexpected compromise on the part of Beijing, the issue will remain unresolved going into 2014.

Xinjiang and Tibet Unrest

China's positions in East Asia are a vital issue to Communist Party leadership, but still pale in importance to the country's top priority: avoiding domestic instability. Though the government avoided widespread labor unrest—aside from environmental protests in Kunming over a local issue—unrest in the Tibet and Xinjiang regions continued. Several more Tibetans set themselves on fire in 2013, bringing the overall total of politically-motivated self-immolations to over 100 since 2009.

In addition, the country's issues with the Uighur minority, natives of China's far-western Xinjiang Autonomous Region, erupted in late June with an attack on a government building in the town of Lukqun. Blamed on Uighur separatists, the violence claimed 35 lives.

Then in October, Beijing's Xinjiang problem struck closer to home, when a jeep crashed in the capital's Tiananmen Square, killing five. The incident unnerved China's leadership—whose compound lies just a few hundred yards away—and served as a chilling reminder that Beijing's ethnic policies in its westernmost region are not working.

A Chilling Crackdown on Foreign Journalism

Foreign journalists in China came under more pressure than ever in 2013, the first year under Xi Jinping's administration. After the New York Times and Bloomberg published investigations into the wealth of top Communist leaders last year, the Communist Party blocked both agency's websites and refused to issue newly hired journalists visas to report in China.

This year, following the completion of a subsequent report into the political connections of Wang Jianlin, China's wealthiest man, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler reportedly spiked the story in order to preserve the company's access to China (or, perhaps, the availability of Bloomberg's lucrative financial terminals). Though Winkler denied the report, the incident illustrated a disturbing trend in Beijing's relationship with the media: As China grows more powerful, its tolerance for criticism diminishes. Vice President Joseph Biden spoke sharply against the Chinese media controls this week, remarking that "innovation thrives when people speak freely." Beijing, though, feels it doesn't need to be lectured anymore. And while China's state-run media expands its empire in the United States, reporters for the New York Times and Bloomberg now face possible expulsion from the country for simply doing their jobs.

Yet in spite of this clampdown on official media, hundreds of millions of people continue to tweet news, gossip, and images on platforms like Sina Weibo and WeChat, providing China-watchers with far more information about what Chinese people think and feel than would have been possible even five years ago. And, while Xi Jinping's public campaign against the platform's "Big V"—or most popular—users managed to quiet dissent, the decentralized, instant nature of online communication in China cannot be suppressed. That, looking ahead to 2014, is a trend worth keeping watch of.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.